As layer after layer of new landscapes come into view, as invention after invention brings life to life, as the cave ceases to exist and the primitive man is freed from his inner cave, his conservative and stagnant perception of the world, not only the primitive man but also the audience embraces the idea that man has to break the fear of change.
My heart is still in the moment when the primitive people climbed to the top of the giant tree, when Gai blew out the torches in his hands and the sky was filled with stars and a galaxy of stars in full splendour before their eyes. For the Crudders, who saw going out at night as a death sentence, this was a sight they had never seen before.
Changing their existing dogmatic mindset not only gave them the practical convenience of stepping painlessly over sharp coral, but also gave them a mental picture of how life can be as bright as a starry sky. Life is not simply about ‘not dying’, but about a process that one can enjoy.
Another scene that struck me was when the rest of the Crudd family found their way out of a maze of stones in a way that they had never tried before, and the father was the only one who kept going in circles, unable to get out of the maze.
In fact, at that time, he must have been very frightened inside, ostensibly because he could not get out of the labyrinth, but actually because of the fear of the lack of faith caused by the failure of his original set of methods and ideas. At that point, a new faith is logically handed in. In fact, this is the way in which the United States has been culturally indoctrinating the world, by first putting people from other civilisations in a labyrinth, making them distrust their original ideas, and then logically instilling its ideas into them.
Of course, the above is just a little irreverent association on my part. But the film’s portrayal of his father, Gua, does seem a little too symbolic, in that it wants him to be a symbol of change from the old to the new. For the sake of this symbolism, the film assumes that the old-fashioned Brother Gua can suddenly change his ways and innovate himself in order to maintain his position of authority in the family – and not be replaced by the new kid, Gai.
In my view, this change is a bit too much of a 180-degree turn, and at a deeper level is not in keeping with the character of the father as a person. What does fit is that he is suffering from the inability to innovate and change easily, rather than from the fact that the new ideas seem to be useless for the time being.
There is a categorisation in communication science of audiences as innovators, early practitioners, followers and laggards, which corresponds in this film. The mother, the other two children and the grandmother are the followers, who wait until the use of the new thing is clear before adopting and accepting it, and are the safer type of consumers. Finally, Gua is a lagger, when most people have accepted new things, this type of people still continue to use the old ways, and their behaviour is difficult to change.
In this way, Mad Men is an idealisation of the character curve, which is intended to reinforce the indoctrination of American ideas and culture, by making a lagger into a follower, or in the end, not even a follower, but an innovator.
Our world, or human beings as such, need laggards. For the laggard counterbalances the acceleration of self-destruction that can result from human curiosity. Breaking the fear of change is only one side of the coin, not the whole, it has another side, which is that one must retain the fear of change. The film encourages everyone to become innovators, followers, to be on one side of the coin, which may make us lose that little wariness of the mythical story of the infinite calamity invited by the opening of Pandora’s box, when in reality, much of our technology in life, our so-called exploratory experiments with the earth, with the universe, with ourselves, is a repetition of the experiment against Pandora’s box.
Leaving aside the symbolic significance of Gua’s role in this aspect of the film’s theme – change – the role he plays in the unit of family and kinship is commendable, especially when he finally throws the rest of the family in turn to safety, leaving himself in danger, he stands tall beyond measure, even if he is the world’s most lagging laggard! What he did for his family was enough to sustain a great personality, so why should he be required to leap from a lagger to an innovator and thus become a “completer”? Shouldn’t we admire him for loving his family so much and protecting them with his own strength and hands, even if his thinking is conservative and rigid?
From the point of view of the character arc, it is perhaps inevitable that the film should portray the transformation of Gua’s thinking, but from the point of view of life, I think it is perhaps more profound for him to remain conservative. For life, not only requires innovation, but also conservatism; children do not only need so-called new ideas, but also sometimes the traditional nagging of their parents.
Another character that stood out to me was the grandmother. This lively grandmother has a low status in the family, unlike Chinese families where people are respected as they get older, and Gua often even imagines a family life without her – because she is a “useless” person, unable to hunt or discipline her children. In the eyes of primitive people, who prioritise practicality, she is of course superfluous.
But let us see, is she superfluous at last? No! Is she useless? Neither! She makes a weighty statement at the end, telling her son, Gua, that you impress me. This character, apart from the comic necessity, incarnates by the end as a true elder figure, judging the actions of the protagonist with the tone of a wise man and the perspective of a good man. In the end we learn that she is also a good person with wisdom.
There are many cute characters in the film. Here, the creators have used an interesting method of creating munchkins called blending. If you look closely, each animal in it is made by mixing the characteristics of two or three real animals. The little elephant, for example, is a combination of a mouse and an elephant; the flying fish is a combination of a shark and some kind of bird, and so on. Trying to create an otherworldly world is difficult, especially to create so many otherworldly and splendid creatures, and the hybrid approach is perhaps a methodology worth learning from our directors.
